Getting it in the Head. Mike McCormack

At school I listened critically to the tales of the great ideological killers – Hitler, Stalin et al. I became convinced that the century was nothing more than a massive fiction, an elaborate snuff-movie hugely budgeted and badly edited, ending with an interminable list of credits. I came to believe that beneath this vast panorama of warring nations and heaving atrocities the true identity and history of my time was being written by solitary minds untouched by ideology or political gain – solitary night stalkers prowling alleyways and quiet, suburban homes, carrying their knives and axes and guns and garrottes. And I believed also it was only in this underworld that concepts of guilt and evil and justice had any meaning, this world where they were not ridiculed and overwhelmed by sheer weight of numbers. Bundy, Dahmer, Hindley, Chikatilo, Nielsen, the list goes on, an infernal Pantheon within which I will now discreetly take my humble place.

      I is for Indolence

      After my leaving cert I signed on as a government artist – I drew the dole. It was an issue of some scandal in the village; after all, my father was the possessor of probably the biggest private fortune in the county.

      One evening after signing on I sat in a local pub putting a sizeable hole in my first payment – I was quickly discovering the joys of solitary drinking. On an overhead TV I listened to the news and heard that the unemployment figures had topped three hundred thousand for the first time. The figure was greeted with equal measures of awe and disgust by the other drinkers.

      ‘Christ, it’s a shame, all those young people coming out of school and college and no jobs for them. The country is going to hell.’

      ‘In a hand cart,’ another added.

      A third was not so sure. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, a large, straight-talking man. ‘Half of those fuckers on the dole have no intention of working, they’d run a mile from it. And it’s not as if there isn’t plenty of it to do either. Look at the state of the roads or the graveyards for that matter. A crowd of friggin spongers the whole lot of them if the truth be told.’

      It was a brave thesis, particularly so in a townland surrounded by subsistence farms, the owners of which topped up their incomes with government hand-outs.

      But he was right, at least in my case he was. I went home that night and for the first time in my life I knew what I was. I was a sponger, a slacker, a parasite, a leech on the nation’s resources. Like most of my generation I had neither the will nor imagination to get up and do something useful with my life. And what was worse I took to my role joyfully, safe in the knowledge that I could fob off any queries by pointing to the statistics or by saying that I was indulging in a period of stocktaking and evaluation before I launched myself on the world with a definite plan. I could loftily declare that I was on sabbatical from life. Only in solitary moments of truth and pitiless insight would I speak the truth to myself: I had no worthwhile ideas and no courage; I was good for nothing.

      J is for James

      The only shaft of light in my childhood years was the presence of my friend James. Throughout my trial he was the one constant, sitting in the public gallery with his hair pulled back in a tight braid, chewing his bottom lip. I could feel his eyes upon me, placed like branding irons in the centre of my chest. Now he comes to me every week, bringing me my record collection and my books: Hesse, Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky, a young man’s reading or so I’m told.

      James was more than my friend, he was my champion. I would be at the centre of one of those taunting circles, my tormentors wheeling about me, dealing out cuffs to the side of my head and insults. ‘Ear we go, ear we go, ear we go,’ they would chant. My defence then was to disappear down inside myself, down into that part within me which was clear and painless, a place lit by fantasy, ideas, books and music. Almost inevitably James would round the corner. I would see in his eyes the dark fire that was already igniting his soul.

      ‘Leave him alone, you pack of cunts,’ he’d yell. ‘Leave him alone.’

      Then he would wade into the centre of the circle, shouldering me aside, his Docs and fists flying, working his surprise to the limit by scoring busted noses and bruised balls. Sooner or later, however, he would find himself at the bottom of a pile of heaving bodies, curling into a tight foetal position to ward off the kicks and blows that rained down on him. Just as suddenly my tormentors would scatter, yelling and whooping, leaving James bloodied and bruised on the ground like carrion. In those moments I used to think that James was the victim not of his love for me but of his own rampant imagination. Now I can see him rising from the dust, his face bloodied and running like a clown’s make-up, and I curse myself for my cynicism.

      K is for Kill

      The axe swung through the air and cleft my father’s skull in two and he lay dead upon the floor.

      L is for Lug

      When I reached my teens I grew my hair to my shoulders. By then, however, it was already too late to prevent me from being teased mercilessly and earning a succession of nicknames. My peers were never short of cruel puns and covert abuse whenever I was near. ‘Ear ear,’ they would yell whenever I opened my mouth to speak or, ‘Ear we go, ear we go, ear we go,’ whenever we gathered to watch football matches. From national school my name was Lug and in secondary school the more technically minded tried to amend it to Mono. But Lug was the name that stuck and I hated them for it, hated them for their stupid wit and their lack of mercy. But I did not hate them as much as I hated my father on the day he discovered it. He returned from answering the phone in the hallway. It was one of my ‘friends’.

      ‘Lug,’ he said gleefully. ‘Christ, they have you well named there and no doubt about it. We used to have an ass with that name once – Lugs. Mind you, he was twice the creature you are. He could work and he had a full set of ears.’

      I burst out crying and ran to my room. I stayed there the rest of the afternoon, weeping and grinding my teeth. I eventually dried my eyes and took a look at myself in the mirror and I resolved then that no one would ever make me cry again.

      M is for Music

      Because of my impaired hearing my love of music has caused much wonderment. Again this has proved a fertile snuffling ground for those commentators desperate to unearth truffles of reason in this tale of blood and woe.

      I am a metal head, a self-confessed lover of bludgeoning rhythms in major chords and rhyming couplets dealing in death and mayhem. My record collection, now numbering in hundreds, reads like a medieval codex of arcana: Ministry, Obituary, Bathroy, Leather Angel, Black Sabbath and so on. My greatest solace now is that I can listen to these records in the privacy of my cell without maddening anyone. If there was anything certain to unleash my father’s temper it was the sound of these records throbbing through the house. He would come hammering at my bedroom door.

      ‘Turn that fucking shite off,’ he’d roar. ‘Christ, you would think a man of your age should have grown out of that sort of thing long ago.’

      But I never did grow out of it and I don’t foresee a day when I will. This horror of this music is rooted within me as deep as my very soul and I would no more think of defending it than my father would his own lachrymose renditions of ‘Moonlight on the Silvery Rio Grande’.

      N is for Never

      As in never again. At the bottom of our souls all young men are sick. We do not grow sick or become sick nor is it some easy matter of hormonal determinism. This sickness is our very nature. Having suffered from the disease myself I know what I am talking about. It manifests itself generally as a disorder of the head, a slant of the imagination that preoccupies us with mayhem and blood, slashing and hacking, disease, waste and carnage. There is not a young man of my age who, in the privacy of his own heart, has not thought of killing someone. Many times James and I would sit fantasizing about a kill of our own, our very own corpse. We weighed up the options like assassins and narrowed it down to a single, clean strike in an airport terminal bathroom where there is an abundance of unwary victims and suspects. We were armchair psychos, already tasting the blood. Most young men grow out of this sort of thing, taking to heart second-hand lessons in mercy and compassion, turning in wonder and revulsion from their